calr

Given a piece of contemporary art, will you be able to tell whether it was created by a human or an AI process? What if your in a gallery looking at collection, but the artist is pseudo-anonymous and no one really knows what tools they use behind the scenes to create their work? Would you allow their work to move you?

I find commuting from the 24th and Mission to downtown via the BART very pleasant these days. Before COVID I would fight my way and barely squeeze in. Now I get a seat just about every time. I get off at Montgomery, so I am able to skip over the sketchier stops on Market (Civic center and Powell to some extent). There are still plenty of great cafes, coffeeshops, and bars open within walking distance of my office. Overall no complaints; I enjoy going into the office much more than before COVID.

When a company is nationalized what typically happens to the shareholders? Are they wiped, do they get paid out, or does some of their ownership carry over to the new entity (rights to a special dividend or something)?

Agree, this does not matter to Mark Cuban and certainly not us. Mark is gonna be fine even in the absolute worst case where the money is locked up for years, and he takes a 20% haircut on his modest deposit. This crisis is for businesses that need access to their money now to pay wages and bills.

Also curious hearing from an expert on this one way or the other. Took the Tweet at face value without actually being able to confirm under what circumstances that would be true.

"Unpaid wages pierce the corporate veil, so boards are incredibly sensitive to employing workers they may not be able to pay."

This is the key point in my opinion, and one I was not aware existed. Personal liability changes everything. You can't tell employees to sit tight while funds eventually get unlocked if you're going to find yourself getting sued.

Ignorance of your "black box" excuses not

Thanks for sharing this video. It's hard to reconcile how these kids live and speak about their lives vs my own thinking. It seems to be a very nihilistic philosophy.

Or perhaps credit card popularity is increasing; spending that was previously done via cash and debit cards is shifting to credit cards. That would leave earnings constant.

Thanks for the in depth write up. Makes a lot of sense!

Noob question that I am sure is answered many times. What are the catalysts for a private company switching from options to RSUs (double trigger). In my previous role I got RSUs (double trigger), but now at a much smaller startup I have an option package. As an employee RSUs are a bit easier to make sense of, but both are equity instruments at the end of the day. When, and why does that transition happen?

Edit this is answered fairly well here: https://www.parkworth.com/blogs/pre-ipo-tech-giants-using-do.... The TLDR is SEC rules and limited perceived upside of options (although I imagine that could be solved via a lower strike price).

Is it correct to suspect that there are fixed costs for operating in different markets, and they aren’t breaking even in Japan?

I’ve had the same experience. Search is unusable far too often for general keywords; I end up making a failed keyword search and then fall back to making a search based on sender address. Searching on sender address works fine but requires me to correctly recall who sent an email I’m looking for.

I think I see what your saying. Wealth creation is dilutive on a relative basis, meaning in 2019 the lower/middle class had X% of the total wealth. By “creating” a bunch of new wealth the denominator grows and on a relative basis the middle/lower class becomes less wealthy.

Perhaps this is philosophical, but how much actual “wealth” was created by humans in the past two years? Yes, assets values went up, but how much if any of the that growth was “real” vs inflationary? Did businesses get that much more efficient, did we invent new technologies to improve our standard of life? If the wealth captured isn’t real, meaning it can’t be realized in any normal sense (outside of big numbers on a screen) does it matter?

With a third party client Twitter can’t (easily?) measure if an ad was actually seen by the end user (impression) or if it was just served by the API but never rendered on the users screen. A lot of ad measurement follows from there.

Will try this for sure. Love that bananas are portable by design.

I have skipped breakfast since college when I was much more concerned about bulking up. I drink two coffees and that gets me through til lunch. I’ve never really considered alternatives to this routine. If I wanted to experiment with breakfasts what do people recommend eating? The priority would be energy levels, and mental clarity since I tend to work better in the morning.

Not to dismiss your points, but if you are going to title the post “I lost 200k” it’d be nice to at least explain where the money went. Was it routine operating expenses that ultimately went to fund a failed product, or something more nefarious (#1 hints at that).

In my mind, Flexport is part of the "real" economy of moving atoms. They don't fall into the more fluffy "we are a startup that helps other startups start-up". I wonder if this is an early sign for a rough recession that spills outside of the current VC-backed tech slowdown.

I also am a bit surprised by this. AI is back to being the hotness now that crypto blew itself up. I suspect from reading this quote:

"Many of the industries we serve, such as e-commerce and consumer technology, have been buoyed by the pandemic and are now experiencing a painful market correction."

that they had an established segment of customers that were experimentally looking at ML to augment their core business, and how they could leverage with their data. Perhaps these companies are pulling back spend with whispers of a shaky 2023 economy.